The sky crackles.
It wakes Beth up because it’s so noisy, like firecrackers snapping away. The television is halfway through a Japanese cartoon, but that doesn’t give her a time to use as reference. The clock says that it’s just gone midnight, which means she’s barely been asleep any time at all. It’s so dark in the flat, only the TV is giving off any light at all.
Snap, snap, snap.
She stands up and stretches, and her head feels clear enough, but the air in the flat is horrible. Hot, not just warm, and nearly wet. On the rare occasions that they have storms, they’re perfect for clearing out everything. Like a reset button, and they leave the ground smelling – what was it that Laura called it? Petrichor? Petrichlor? – and the sky clear. And everything’s cooler for a few days. Not long enough to get used to it, but in the same way that people used to celebrate the British summer. They get out and enjoy it while it lasts. It’s no longer something that everybody has to fight against.
Beth walks to the window and pulls back the curtain. The rain hasn’t started yet, and she knows what she expects to see, but it’s different. The sky isn’t just black: intermittently a filthy grey shade, lit by the lightning. There are other people outside, and in the distance she can see the sun buried underneath the clouds. It’s 11 a.m. The sky crackles again, and the lightning rushes across it, smacking into itself. It’s bad special effects from a science-fiction movie. It’s one of those gadgets where the electricity is attracted to somebody’s palm resting on the glass. It rolls through the clouds – like horses through waves, Beth thinks, which she remembers from somewhere, but she’s not sure where – and it seems to leap before it dissipates. She forgets about everything else: Vic, the Machine, her own life. She opens the front door and breathes it in, the damp, the sense that it’s about to happen. Everybody senses it.
And then it rains. It thuds in single drops first, thwap, down onto the concrete, and they’re almost big enough to make their own puddles. They’re as warm as everything else. Thwap, thwap. More of them. Each of the residents of the estate stays under cover, even her next-door neighbour, who hides indoors as her daughters run out, well past when they should be asleep. After the drops comes the flood, a gush of water coming down on them. Heavier than Beth’s ever seen before, she thinks. Nobody talks: down in the courtyard people stand huddled. It seems almost reverential. The rain pours and then the lightning comes, and all across the sky it can be seen, ripping down from the sky, smacking onto buildings. The lights are on in all the flats one minute, and the next they’re gone. The power tears out through the entire estate, and as far into the distance as Beth can see from the balcony: no lights down at the shops, no lights on the estate past that, or the houses that run around the edge of the island further down. Total blackness, apart from the lightning.
Snap.
Beth rushes back inside to Vic and the Machine, and she doesn’t know what she expected, but it’s still making that low-level hum, and it’s still going. It’s still plugged in and she doesn’t know what she expected, because that battery keeps on going, and now she wonders why everybody else doesn’t hear it: when the rest of the ambient noise is gone and all that’s left is the Machine and the light from it and that noise, which comes from somewhere at its back, in the dark, somewhere that she knows doesn’t have a speaker and shouldn’t be able to make noise. And what if Laura is right? With her protesting and her crying and her berating and praying to God? What if this is as unnatural as she’s suggesting? She reaches out slowly, tentatively, and she presses the screen – Vic doesn’t stir, completely knocked out by the day – and it lights up, and the light fills the room.
How are you still working? she asks it. That rumble, like the thunder itself. Roll of noise; pause; flash of light. She’s terrified, but this is what she wanted. She wanted Vic back. Somehow she’s getting him.
There’s time to do another, she thinks. She’s awake, and she’s got power. One more couldn’t hurt. She pulls the Crown down and rests it on Vic’s head. She wonders if it works when he’s asleep; if anybody’s ever tried it. She could be the first, a pioneer.
She presses play. Outside, the lightning fizzes.